W-boson helicity fractions in top decay as probes of dimension-6 and dimension-8 SMEFT operators

Abstract

Precision measurements of top-quark decays provide powerful probes of physics beyond the Standard Model (SM). While the impact of dimension-6 operators in the SM Effective Field Theory (SMEFT) has been extensively studied, the role of dimension-8 contributions remains largely unexplored, despite their potential importance as experimental precision improves. In this work, we present a combined analysis of dimension-6 and a representative subset of dimension-8 SMEFT effects using the W-boson helicity fractions in top-quark decays. We compute the leading-order contributions of these operators to the top-quark decay width and helicity fractions, and perform one-parameter and selected two-parameter $\chi^{2}$ fits to the combined ATLAS and CMS measurements at a reference scale $\Lambda=1$~TeV. From the fit results, we find that the inclusion of dimension-8 contributions affects the allowed parameter space of several dimension-6 coefficients through non-trivial correlations and degeneracies. Since the leading dimension-8 contributions enter at the same order $\mathcal{O}(\Lambda^{-4})$ as the squared dimension-6 terms retained in our analysis, this highlights the importance of a consistent treatment of the EFT expansion when interpreting SMEFT constraints.